THE FACTORY OF FACTS
By Luc Sante
Pantheon, 306 pages, $24
ALL THE WAY TO HEAVEN: An American Boyhood in the Himalayas
By Stephen Alter
Holt, 319 pages, $25
Childhoods that span more than one continent and culture; memories sealed off by distance as much as time; identities that feel irrevocably divided and oddly malleable. These are the experiences of a sizable number of Americans who grew up in the unprecedentedly mobile era since World War II.
Two new memoirs explore both the lonely and enriching aspects of this fractured sense of origin. In “The Factory of Facts,” Belgian-born essayist Luc Sante, who was raised in suburban New Jersey with periodic returns to Europe, brilliantly examines what it’s like to be “something of an international co-production.” Novelist Stephen Alter isn’t as penetrating in his reminiscence about growing up the eldest son of American missionaries in northern India. But “All the Way to Heaven” still makes vivid his early sense of estrangement from his passport nationality.
Both men differed from immigrants of yore in that they (with their parents) made repeated moves, back and forth, rather than one decisive move. Thus Sante talks of arriving four times in America during childhood, “with a differently shaded feeling of discovery every time,” while Alter writes of being “unwilling to commit myself to one country or the other” when in his teens. Alter now lives in Massachusetts, but he has a cousin who took the leap and became a citizen of India. Sante, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, is a confirmed Manhattanite, lives “almost entirely in English now”–and holds onto his Belgian citizenship.
Densely packed and crisply focused, “The Factory of Facts” is winningly playful in its stretching of the memoir genre, starting with an opening chapter that serves up nine wildly conflicting potted plots of Sante’s life. The real story: Sante, an only child, first came to the U.S. with his parents in 1959 at age 5, and eventually, after seven moves back and forth, the family settled in Summit, N.J., a commuter-line suburb of New York.
By his late teens, Sante had suppressed all trace of his Belgian background: “Willfully, accidentally, organically, negligently, crudely, systematically, inevitably I got rid of a section of myself, a part that was once majority and shrank to accessory. I went from being the little Belgian boy, polite and diffident and possessed of a charming accent, to a loutish American adolescent.” This “project of self-invention” was so successful that he became “a sort of hydroponic vegetable, growing soil-free.”
Clearly there is trouble brewing here, and it manifests itself in an unsettling dream the grownup Sante has about a country erased from all historical records. Some ad hoc dream analysis leads him to conclude that while it’s “fascinating and often fruitful to try on another skin . . . it is ultimately meaningless if one hasn’t acknowledged one’s own.” Every human being, he theorizes, is an “archeological site.” And so, with vigor and tenacity, he begins to dig into himself, his family, the country of his earliest childhood and the slippery workings of language, memory and culture.
The resulting book is an elegant collage of 15 chapters, some personal in character, others more dispassionately curious about their chosen topics. They include deft summaries of Belgian history, shrewd analyses of Belgian character and culture, subtle meditations on bilingualism and rueful recollections of how the “preposterous El Dorado” of America–“a candy mountain that existed only in rumor and representation”–bore no connection to the “industrial dead zone” of New Jersey where the Santes first landed upon arrival in the U.S.
The Belgium of his parents’ lifetime, with its repeated invasions by Germany and its economic vicissitudes (his father’s loss of his textile-industry job precipitated the family’s move), emerges as a grim place, and Sante’s account of his parents’ ordeals is page-turning stuff. More quietly absorbing is his examination of Belgium’s mixed Flemish and Walloon heritage, which makes the country as culturally divided as the author himself.
Best of all are Sante’s thumbnail character portraits, whether of historical figures or family. Belgian painter Rene Magritte, he writes fondly, was a visionary of a “peculiarly Belgian overcast Sunday-afternoon boredom, the murderous boredom of the civil servant at home.” A sketch of his mother, occasioned by perusal through a family photo album, is just as sly and loving:
“My mother, however temperamental as a tot, grew up to be a good girl, that much is clear. As time draws on in the stream of pictures she recedes from them, fulfilling a duty but swallowing her personality in the process. I recognize her in her strained formal mode, trying to oblige company by wearing a half-smile of the sort that signifies virtue rather than pleasure, not quite knowing what to do with her hands, standing meekly while attempting to guess what is required of her even as she boils inside.”
A little less loving are Sante’s memories of being constantly told “how Belgian children were obedient, well-mannered, and clean; how if only we’d stayed there I would have been a model schoolboy and the perfect son.” Sante the adult may feel sheepish about all the trouble Sante the adolescent gave his parents, but he makes it clear how sorely tried his teenage self was by the conflation of generational and cultural divides that seemed to affect him alone.
While skillfully limning every confusion that came with growing up between cultures, Sante concludes by firmly favoring “the advantage of mobility.” His chewy, ironical, double-edged prose seems a direct result of that mobility, as does his supple movement of mind.
Alter’s “All the Way to Heaven” covers territory just as promising, but in a duller way. Born in 1956 to a Presbyterian missionary family based in India since 1917, Alter grew up bilingual in English and Hindi, in a town he describes as “Winesburg, Ohio, transported to the first range of the Himalayas.” For him the United States was an “imaginary point of origin, to which we would all return,” while the scenic and cultural wonderland of India was more obviously “home.”
His parents were granted stateside furloughs by their church every five years, so in 1961-1962 and 1967-1968 he had a chance to compare the America of his school textbooks and parents’ memories with the real thing. With its missile crises, assassinations, riots and anti-war protests, it struck him as “a threatening, unsettled place . . . full of controversy, bloodshed, and danger.” During his college years he felt just as uncomfortable here.
Alter offers no detail on how he gave up beloved India to settle in Massachusetts, where he now teaches, and while his frequent pangs at being split between countries are plainly registered, he lacks Sante’s rigor in examining his culturally bifurcated state. As for his portraits of friends and family, they rarely get beyond the cipher stage.
That’s a pity, because the region where Alter grew up was a curious place: both a hot tourist spot and a base camp for American missionaries of every possible denomination (all, of course, at odds with one another). A late-1960s influx of Western hippies in search of Eastern enlightenment bestowed a final crowning absurdity on this outpost of churchly proselytizing, and Alter details this with amusement.
Still, the physical landscape of his Himalayan boyhood is what impresses him most, and he spends far more time describing it, footpath by footpath, ridge by ridge, than he does getting inside the characters who inhabit it. By its end “All the Way to Heaven” is an informative journey in its way, but one where you never get to focus as long as you’d like on the points of genuine interest.
